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them to two different people. It’s always good for knowledge to be shared.

7
There are seven tricks to being happy
    Hey, kid, you’re not sleeping, right? Listen, this is the first one. The most important thing in life is to know how to say no. Write it down so you won’t forget
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    —my first roommate, Mr. Fermín (age seventy-six), at 5:12 in the morning
    This is a piece of advice that an old man with whom I shared my first hospital room gave me. It was a six-man room; later they moved me into a two-man one. He gave me this advice very early one morning: Early mornings bring people together so much that you get the courage to confess desires and inadmissible dreams. Then the day comes and with it … with it … sometimes there comes regret.
    Mr. Fermín was an impressive man: He’d had thirty different jobs, was seventy-six years old, and had a life full of incredible stories. For a kid of fourteen who was coming into the hospital for the first time, this was the mirror I wanted toreflect myself in, the future I wanted and wasn’t sure I was going to be able to attain. I thought this man was really great. He was pure energy.
    He always ate oranges; he loved oranges. He smelled citrusy. Over the seven nights he shared a room with me he gave me advice about how to have a good life; he gave me what he called the seven rules for being happy.
    Every rule came with an explanation that lasted an hour, with lots of graphic examples. The people who studied in these life-lesson classes were a fellow Egghead from the Canary Islands with one arm and me (who would later end up with one leg). His dissertations were very enjoyable, great fun. He made us take note of everything. I think that a lot of times he thought we didn’t understand anything at all. And he was right. I understood almost nothing, but those notes in my adolescent handwriting have lasted me the rest of my life.
    He made us promise that we would never tell these seven rules to anyone unless we felt ourselves to be close to death. Both of us promised, although we argued with him about this. (We were adolescents: At that age you argue about everything.) We thought it would be difficult to keep those secrets. There was a difficult period of give-and-take, but eventually we got him to tell us one of the rules. And this is the one I’ll tell you.
    What I’m going to tell you is the first piece of advice he gave. I heard it the first morning I ever spent in the hospital. It’s a memory that smells of oranges. I like it when memories have a smell.
    He asked us to sit up, looked at both of us, and said:“Write this down. In this life you’ve got to know how to say no.”
    The guy from the Canary Islands and I looked at each other: We didn’t understand a thing. How to say no? And anyway, why did we have to say no, when it’s so great to say yes?
    Next, just as he would do on the next six nights, he gave us a long explanation about why you have to say no. I wrote down the following:
    • No to what you don’t want.
    • No to what you don’t yet know that you don’t want but at the moment you do want.
    • No to obligations.
    • No if you know you won’t be able to fulfill what you’re being asked to do.
    • And most important: Say no to yourself!!!
    I think that saying no to yourself must have been the most important one because he made us put down lots of exclamation marks after it. Next to the last exclamation mark there’s even a stain made by a segment of orange (or that’s what I think when I look at it). Sometimes what one wants is so intense that it becomes a reality.
    The day after giving us the seventh piece of advice, he died. It was one of those deaths that mark you: He gave us seven rules to be happy and then he died. The guy from the Canary Islands and I were both aware of what he had left us. We decided to make a pact: We’d never lose the notes he’dmade us take, and when we understood them we’d put them to use.
    I forgot about